I’ve just been reading through the newly released findings from NZCER’s 2025 National Survey of Secondary Schools – a survey of 106 secondary principals across Aotearoa conducted between October 2025 and March 2026. It’s the kind of document that rewards careful reading, not because it contains many surprises, but because it puts hard numbers around things that many of us have been sensing for some time. And it prompted me to write this.
What emerges for me from the survey is a portrait of a profession stretched to its limits – a similar finding to what I found in my own Roadblocks and Drivers thought piece from 2023. Most principals are working at least 56 hours a week – with 12% exceeding 70 hours. A third now agree that their workload is so high they are unable to do justice to their school. That figure was 22% just three years ago. The leading issue principals identified? “Keeping up with the pace and volume of educational change” – followed closely by “too much being asked of schools.”
This is what a burning platform looks like from the inside.
What concerns me most about that picture is when people are working at this intensity, simply surviving the week, the capacity for strategic thinking – for lifting one’s gaze to the horizon – is the first casualty.
We see this in one quietly concerning data point from the survey where only one-third of principals said they had information about their school’s carbon footprint. This, despite clear policy signals from the Ministry of Education about the need to reduce climate emissions across the sector.
I don’t read that finding as indifference to climate. I read it as a workforce so consumed by the immediate that the important – including preparing young people for a climate-altered future – is being structurally crowded out. The issue isn’t awareness. It’s capacity.
This is a thread I’ve been tracking closely in the Education Environment Scan 2026 – the idea that we are facing not a series of separate challenges, but a convergence of pressures arriving simultaneously. Climate disruption, workforce depletion, AI-driven change to learning and assessment, equity gaps that refuse to close, and a policy environment characterised by short cycles and shifting priorities. Each of these is significant on its own. Together, they create something qualitatively different: a system that is structurally incapable of looking up from the urgent long enough to prepare for what’s coming.
The NZCER data adds texture to that argument. Recruiting teachers remains an issue for nearly two-thirds of principals. Demand for external support – mental health services, social workers, youth workers – consistently outstrips supply. The disestablishment of Kāhui Ako has left 41% of principals thinking they will collaborate less with neighbouring schools. These aren’t isolated data points. They describe a workforce that is narrowing, not expanding – that is being pulled inward by demand rather than freed to think outward about the future.
What would it take to change that? I don’t think the answer is simply more professional learning, more resourcing, or even a slower pace of reform – though all of those would help. The deeper issue is that we haven’t yet designed an education system that takes seriously its own need to think strategically about the future while simultaneously serving the present. That requires protected time, distributed leadership, genuine cross-sector collaboration, and – critically – a policy environment that provides stability and coherence over the long term rather than perpetual reinvention.
The principals in this survey aren’t asking for less. They’re asking for something harder to provide – the conditions in which their professional judgement, experience, and vision can actually be brought to bear on what matters most.
The NZCER survey is a snapshot of a moment. But it’s also a signal. And if we’re serious about future-focused education in Aotearoa, we need to start asking who is going to be left standing to lead it – and what kind of thinking they’ll have the capacity to do.
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